Trains and more trains

Trains, trains trains!!

2011 was not fun. Mid December I found out I needed a somewhat major surgery to my skull and sinuses and that pretty much took up all my time. January rolled around and I had the surgery. All went well except the swelling prevented my eyes from focusing on detail-work. That meant no artwork.

Fast-forward to March and my eyes have healed enough to allow me to paint again. Here's a long-overdue update on the train painting. I'll post all the process shots so far. Right now it's done but for the highlights and some details. And the type. Did I mention the type? I have a quote to paint under the train. Hand-painted lettering. Fun. Reminds me of the stuff I did back in the 80s, but that's another post for another time.

Process shots are below:

Pencil sketch with rough value placement

Underpainting with warm colors to help establish my focus.
The cooler blues will recede.

Background is done and train is started.

Almost done. Strangely, all that needs doing here is to
eliminate some details.

Keep in mind that the last one hasn't been sprayed with anything yet, so the areas that were painted with more linseed oil on the brush are darker than the rest. Also, the different mixtures of black affect the gloss. After I hit it with a final coat of varnish, it will even out.

Eowyn and the Nazgul Challenge: Comp Sketch

Now that the maquette is done enough to use, I've moved onto my first comp sketch. This was done in charcoal pencil on tracing paper while looking at the maquette. The general idea here is to get all the elements I want in the picture actually working together. I'm not worried about anything being rendered properly at this stage, I just want an overall view of the final so I know what problems there are before applying any paint. For example, the horse at the bottom and the beast's tail need composition fixes.

The darker bits of the fell beast's neck was intended to be the area the viewer focuses on first, but after looking at the piece, I now want the Witch King to be the initial focus with your eyes running along the beast's neck to Eowyn. A Chiaroscuro effect between the dark beast's head and Eowyn's radiant blonde hair should provide a 'carrot' for your gaze, keeping you interested in Eowyn. Secondary focus will be her shield and the field of grass. A shadow pattern on the ground should lead your eyes down Eowyn and to the fallen Snowmane and back around to the fell beast. Well, that's the idea, anyway!

I feel this is the most important step in a painting because it lets you establish right away your focus. My next step is to photograph my wife with sword and board in Eowyn's pose and draw that on another piece of tracing paper. Then I'll be finding horse reference and doing the same for Snowmane. The Witch King will be another maquette with real cloth to simulate the folds. I'll re-shoot the maquette and project that onto the board with the rest of the elements added in and moved around a bit.

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Here's the maquette set-up in the final pose. I added yellow construction paper below to give some yellow reflected light from the yellow field of Pelennor and a sheet of blue construction paper for the sky reflection. It's all rudimentary, but all I'm after is an idea of where the light will be reflected.

I decided to stop work on the wings due to time constraints. It was a tough decision, but I think I'll render them in Photoshop. I've been a graphic artist for 20 years now and I've worked with Photoshop since it hit the scene many moons ago. I'm intimately familiar with it and can do the wings in about a half hour.

I *do* plan on finishing this maquette after the ArtOrder/Muddy Colors challenge is done. I've discovered that I quite like sculpting and I'm pretty happy with the way this little maquette is developing!

Train: Pencil Sketch

As I mentioned in my earlier post, I did a pencil sketch of the train before quoting a price. This is a good practice when you haven't drawn something before. It gives you a good idea of what will be involved because a thing often seems simpler in our heads than it does in reality. I discovered whilst doing this sketch that I don't like drawing trains, but I know from experience that you must be enthused about any piece of artwork you're doing. If you aren't enthused or happy about your artwork, it will show. Emotions come through. So I struggled to finde something to get excited about in this train (it wasn't until the underpainting that I really got excited).

 This sketch took me about an hour and a half to do and I was mostly concerned with getting the larger doo-dads down. This also gave me a good idea on what details I didn't need.